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While Facebook, geotagged apps and smartphone payments move us toward a digital future marked in large part by dissipating anonymity, an iOS app launched Wednesday does just the opposite.

It’s called Burner and it gives your iPhone a temporary additional number you can use without casual acquaintances, abrasive associates or unwanted eavesdroppers being able to get a line on your actual line. You can use it to call or text, share contact info on social media and set specific notifications settings separate from your actual regular number.

“Burner is for anyone who has more than one life — or who simply values their privacy,” Greg Cohn, founder & CEO of Burner’s parent company Ad Hoc… Continue reading…

Made by military aircraft manufacturer Northrop Grumman, the LEMV is designed to be a lighter-than-air cargo surveillance airship that can fly without a pilot.

It is designed to float above combat zones for 21 days straight, and is equipped with high-tech sensors that can monitor insurgents from above, the Wall Street Journal reported. While the blimp… Continue reading…

Bike share networks are still a relatively new phenomenon in the U.S. — New York is the latest city to institute such a program. But if you’re traveling abroad, these programs are a cheap and easy way to see some of your favorite cities. CityBikes aggregates bike sharing data for networks in over 40 cities in Europe, Asia and North and South America.

The Android app tells you which stations are near you, how to get there and the number of bikes available. If you happen to be traveling in Paris or Barcelona, you can also receive notifications when bikes at stations near you become available.

CitiyBikes is a free app available for Android on the Google Play Store.

As summer comes to an end, take the opportunity to sneak in a quick trip to a cool locale, whether it’s close to home or a hop, skip and jump away. While navigating unfamiliar territory isn’t always very fun, your mobile device makes life on the go a lot easier.

These 10 transportation apps will help you get around and make the most of your travels, whether you’re driving in a rental car, cycling on a city-share bike or making your way though an international subway system.

Whedonites delight: Joss Whedon has signed on to write and direct the sequel to his summer tentpole flick, The Avengers.

But that’s not all. Marvel Studios announced Tuesday that Whedon has signed an exclusive deal with the studio for film and television through the end of June 2015. In addition to Avengers 2, Whedon will help develop a new live-action series for Marvel Television at ABC. The studio says Whedon will “also contribute creatively to the next phase of Marvel’s cinematic universe.”

Vague as that line may be, the rest of the announcement is concrete and might we say, totally awesome for fans of Marvel and Whedon alike.

In the final days of the Olympics, we have been paying a lot of attention to gold — both the color and what it symbolizes. As Olympic athletes vie for the iconic medal, we took a look at how our readers view “gold” in their everyday lives.

Although the challenge was inspired by the Olympics, our readers took the theme “gold” beyond the iconic medal. We received images of golden sunsets, foliage and architecture. From a field… Continue reading…

The next generation of Samsung’s Galaxy Note handset might have a flexible screen.

Not designed for bending your phone in half, the flexible screen would instead be a material that makes the screen more resilient when it comes to bumps and falls. With a flexible display, if you drop your phone on a rock it has a chance of bouncing back. Do the same thing with glass, and you’re probably in for trouble.

Referred to by some as a ‘phabet’ the Galaxy Note falls between a traditional phone and smaller tablet in the size department. The current version of the handset has a 5.3-inch display, 1.5GHz processor, and comes packing 16GB of built-in m… Continue reading…

Quick Pitch: Mozio is a budding travel site that handles all your ground transportation needs.

Genius Idea: Find all modes of ground transportation from your airport to your end destination on one site.

World traveler David Litwak has been to 65 countries, and has lived in Paris and Estonia. And while there are plenty of travel sites on the web, “there’s really no true travel search engines out there, only flight search engines,” he says.

From that realization, travel site Mozio was born.

Litwak and his UC Berkeley fraternity brother Joseph Metzinizer began creating Mozio in July 2011. In the long run, their “grand vision” for Mozio is to build a compreh… Continue reading…

If you thought the Microsoft Surface was only Windows tablet worth talking about, think again. Lenovo just unveiled the first Windows 8 tablet to pack an Intel mobile chip, making it a full-on Windows PC in a very light form factor.

The product is called the ThinkPad Tablet 2 (Lenovo has never been good at naming things), and it’s an impressive piece of hardware. It has a 10.1-inch screen, is 0.39 of an inch thick and weighs just 1.3 pounds.

The star of this show is Intel’s Clover Trail processor, though. Before the Tablet 2, Windows 8 tablets had to be either Windows RT machines, which can’t run older Windows apps and look to deliver less than the full Windows experience, or devices w… Continue reading…

Pinterest announced Wednesday that it began open registration, dropping its invite-only approach.

Users can now sign up for the social photo sharing website without waiting for an invitation, according to Pinterest’s official blog. Now, prospective pinners can register using their email addresses, or log in with their Facebook or Twitter accounts.

“We’re really excited to have the capacity to offer Pinterest to more people and if you’re a Pinner with friends who’ve been waiting on the sidelines, we hope you’ll let them know,” the blog said.

Prior to opening up, users had to click “Request an Invite” on Pinterest.com, and enter their email address.

Sixteen-year-old Matthew Walzer’s heartfelt letter to Nike’s CEO, Mark Parker, is quickly spreading across Twitter through the hashtag campaign #NikeLetter. Walzer posted the letter on his blog Tuesday afternoon, hoping to make Parker aware of a “great need” for supportive, easily-fastened shoes for people with cerebral palsy.

Walzer was born two months premature, and when he was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, the country’s top doctors told his parents that he would never be able to walk. Against all odds, Walzer can walk with the aid of crutches and his Nike basketball sneakers, which provide ample ankle support.